My wife made baklava the other day to bring in to a potluck at her office.  I’ve had so many soggy, over-sweetened, stale pieces of baklava that I wasn’t so sure of it at first.  One bite later I was a convert.  It was light, flaky, and had just enough sweetness.  The triple-threat combination of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts really elevated it.  Go get some phyllo dough and make this (she used Alton Brown’s recipe).

If you’re coming here from Chambanamoms (welcome!), where I am an occasional contributor, you’ve already seen my take on a vegetarian main dish for St. Patrick’s Day.  If not, go read about that Guinness tofu stew, and learn about my opinion on “authentic” St. Patty’s Day food.

As I touch on there, the food that grocery stores shove down our throats is pre-packaged corned (cured) beef brisket with limp cabbage.  It doesn’t have to be a bad dish, but I haven’t seen it prepared well yet.  Besides that, I’ve been trying (as Chambanamoms editor, Amy, has) to incorporate more meatless meals into our diet.  It can often be cheaper, much healthier, and if you’ve read books about how food is produced in this country (like Michael Pollan’s excellent In Defense of Food) you know that it may be a much more responsible dining option.

I had most of the ingredients for this meal already at home, but if my math is right, I can pick up everything for this meal at the coop, getting all organic produce (and supporting a local business), and still have a complete dinner for four for less than the cost of a bad piece of corned brisket at the grocery store.  And I’d still have to buy more stuff for the sides.

Even if the weather here is warming up, nothing says comforting like a stew.  It’s too bad that most stews cook so long that everything can end up tasting the same.  This meal came together while thinking about making something that was quick and easy, yet packed with lots of flavor (something many vegetarian meals lack).

You can read about how we introduced a lot of flavor into the stew, with umami flavor bombs like soy sauce.  Root vegetables are easier though, since you can just throw them in the oven.  Parsnips are one of my new favorite vegetables, and one that most people overlook.  They look like carrots, but are usually a pale yellowish color on the outside.  You can peel them and treat them just like carrots, but they are a little starchier, which lends well to roasting.

Roasted Parsnips

side/garnish for 4

• 8 parsnips, carrot-sized, a little less than 1 pound
• olive oil, to coat
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 2 T flour

1. Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Peel the parsnips and cut on the bias into 1/4 to 1/2-inch slices.
3. In a bowl, toss parsnips with olive oil, salt, and pepper, until they are all coated.
4. Add flour, and toss to give each slice a good dusting of flour.
5. Spread out on a (foil-lined for easier cleanup) sheet pan, and roast for about 30 minutes, or until they soften and the edges start to brown.

We all know that potatoes and cabbage are very traditional Irish staple ingredients.  There is an old dish that is typically served around Halloween, according to Wikipedia, called colcannon.  It really boils down to mashed potatoes with cabbage (or kale).  Most recipes I’ve seen have you boil the cabbage.  This is a travesty.  Boiling cabbage tends to make it soggy and limp, devoid of flavor.  Worse yet, most recipes suggest overcooking it, which makes it stink and taste bad from the sulfur compounds it contains.

Here we use just a little water with a little oil, steam until it’s soft, then saute it to add some flavor.  I like to leave my cabbage with just a little crunch, but if you like it softer, go ahead and cook it longer.  One great kitchen gadget in use here is a potato ricer, which looks a bit like a giant garlic press.  After you cook your potatoes, cut them in half, put them skin-up in the ricer and press down.  The peel is left behind like magic.

Colcannon

serves 4

• 2-3 pounds of potatoes, scrubbed
• 1/4 – 1/2 head of cabbage, thinly shredded
• 2 T oil
• 6 T butter
• 1 c milk
• salt, pepper, to taste

1. Boil/steam the potatoes until cooked through, about 20-30 minutes depending on the size of your potatoes.  Drain and allow to cool slightly
2. Add the cabbage, the oil, and 1/2 cup of water to the pot, cover and steam over medium-high heat until cabbage begins to darken and soften, about 5-10 minutes.
3. Remove the lid, allow the water to evaporate, then sautee the cabbage with the existing oil until it is as soft and browned as you like, about 5-10 minutes.
4. Lower the heat to low and add the milk and butter.
5. Pass the potatoes through a ricer or food mill, or mash by hand (which would require you to peel them first).
6. Add potatoes into the pot with the cabbage and stir to combine.
7. Taste and adjust texture with more milk and/or butter, and season with salt and pepper.

Potatoes are the perfect foil for stews, as they absorb a little of the liquid and add more heft to the plate.  Plus, well, I just love mashed potatoes!

I hope you find yourself trying some new meatless meals this year.  You may save some money, you may get a little bit healthier, and you’ll be eating with a little less impact on the environment.

Come down to Prairie Fruits Farm this Sunday (tomorrow, March, 14, 2010) from noon-5PM.  Not only will you be able to see some adorable little baby goats, a sure sign that Spring is nearly here, but there will be some tasty bites available as well.  Paul Virant, award-winning executive chef of Vie Restaurant in Western Springs, IL, will be contributing some of the dishes to be shared on Sunday.  He’ll be enjoying the farm with his family while local chefs Alisa DeMarco and Molly Rygg put the finishing touches before serving a very eager (and hungry) audience.  I got a chance to talk on the phone with Virant on Friday as he was shopping with his wife at his local Whole Foods Market.  We talked about this weekend’s event and a slew of other questions I had, including a preview of what you might taste on Sunday.

At his restaurant, Vie (French for “life”), Virant focuses heavily on inspiration from local, seasonal ingredients.  Anyone who’s visited our local farmers’ markets knows the most important reasons why: it’s fresher and it tastes better.  Some studies even suggest there’s much more nutritional value in food that’s been grown well and not shipped and stored long distances.  He also stressed the importance of knowing where his food is coming from and who is growing it.  When looking at the record of many industrial food producers, it’s not hard to appreciate the value of being able to put a face and a voice to the person that raised your food.  When dining at Vie, Virant hopes that his guests learn about what’s available here and now and leave feeling proud of the “great bounty of the Midwest.”

Virant proudly features Prairie Fruits cheeses in his dishes.  He has a good relationship with Wes and Leslie, and has been a featured chef at a previous farm dinner featuring some delicious Triple S pork (Champaign Taste did a great write-up).  He’ll be doing another farm dinner this September, so keep an eye out for when those tickets become available.  This weekend, he’ll be bringing down some chicken liver mousse and rillettes, a traditional French meat spread.  He’ll also be bringing bread baked at Vie and a few vegetable dishes to round out the menu.  Keep an eye out for the turnips, they sounded delicious.

I’m sure this event will draw a large crowd, because hey, baby goats are adorable, and free food is always welcome.  For more information about this Sunday’s open house event, see the whole invitation on Prairie Fruits Farm’s site.  Learn more about chef Paul Virant on the Vie Restaurant site.  After the event, I’ll be sharing the recipe for one of the dishes he’s bringing.  I’ll also be sharing many more things that he shared with me in our conversation.

If you need just a little extra push… here’s a little video I took last year at Prairie Fruits:

I have grown to enjoy trying new food.  I have my wife to thank for introducing me to a wide range of foods that I never really ate before her encouragement.  From my first experience having Thai food to the joy of sushi, I owe it to her.  The exploration continues though, as I go on to cook things we’ve never had before.

Offal, if you’ve never had it, refers to the magical “fifth quarter” of the animal, the stuff that falls off (get it, off-fall?) when you cut it open.  This also includes the extremities, like feet and ears.  Today we’re going to look at some organs and a tissue.  For you vegetarians and squeamish people (and because I don’t have any), I’ll spare you the before pictures.

The most common offal available is liver.  It’s available in many forms, from the grandiose foie gras to buck-a-pound pre-packaged chicken livers.  You may have had pâté, which usually includes the liver of some animal.  My friend, Laurence, makes a mean pork liver pâté studded with tongue.  The flavor and texture is one I find so enjoyable.  Some people, however, turn their noses at it because “it looks like cat food.”  Good… more for us.  Beef liver is available, and is commonly served overcooked and doused with onions to try to cover up the fact that it’s overcooked liver.

You can sometimes find tongue, usually beef tongue, especially if you have ethnic markets available to you.  Americans have tended toward the less-worked, less-flavorful, more expensive parts of the animal, but many in the world have held on to traditional cuts.  I’ve had beef tongue a few times, and none of them were spectacular.  It was beefy, but not terribly flavorful.  It needs to be cooked a long time to make it tender, but in the process it seemed to have lost much of its character.  I recommend you try it… find a good taquería and order one.  If you don’t like it, close your eyes, dump some salsa on it, and pretend it’s actually tenderloin.

Now for the serious stuff, the kind of thing you can’t find at a typical grocery store.  The first is a specialty sausage made with a mix of delicious piggy parts, some spices, some fruit, and blood.  The traditional blood sausage, or boudin noir, is made with caramelized apples and cognac (or calvados), but the Caribbean-inspired riff that I tried (courtesy of Larbo’s skilled manipulation) had raisins soaked in rum.

Since I forgot that it had raisins instead of apples, I stayed true to traditional accompaniments and made simple baked (in butter) apples and crisp-fried (in schmaltz) potatoes, as inspired by the mentions on this page about boudin noir.  As recommended by Larbo, I sizzled the sausages in a skillet until heated through and served them sliced open.  The sausage mixture inside was almost creamy, with a slight metallic hint (blood does have a good amount of iron) in the aftertaste.  The allspice came through as a pleasant warm spice accompaniment to the sausage, and despite the raisin/apple difference, it went very well with the baked apples.

If you learn how to cook potatoes one way, learn how to cook sliced potatoes in a flavorful fat (like lard, goose, or chicken fat) until they are nicely browned all over and crunchy.  I added some lightly sautéed onion and garlic and finished with a sprinkle of parsley.  I could have eaten a bowl of those potatoes.

The other offal experience I recently had was with pork kidney.  I’ve seen them at the University meat salesroom a few times, and was always curious what they’d be like.  Last Friday, when my wife was returning from a business trip, I decided to prepare them as a side dish.  As a filtering organ, I knew there would be a much stronger flavor than, say, tripe or tongue, but there was little advice to be found on the web on how to “purge” them of their offensiveness.  I trimmed the meaty outer portions away from the inner glandular portions and gave them a quick rinse with water.

I did read that overcooking was strictly verboten, as they would quickly become disgusting.  I opted to saute them in a bit of butter, then finish with what I gathered is a traditional mustard sauce.  It was simply a bit of whole grain mustard and heavy cream stirred in at the end.  The mustard and cream worked together with the, ahem, unique flavor of the kidneys to make something that really tasted good.  Our 7-year-old tried them first (without knowing what they were) and said the kidney was “really good.”  To her credit, after we told her what it was, she kept on eating it.  I love that girl!

Edited to add (due to a question via Google Buzz): A friend who reads the blog asked me to be a little more descriptive about the flavor of the kidneys.  Here’s what I said: “I’ll be honest… it had a little bit of acidic twang, but the underlying flavor was deeply meaty. The texture was firm but pretty tender. To put it bluntly, kidneys filter pee and you could taste it juuust a little, but it worked well with the acid and fat of the mustard cream sauce.”

Since my wife loves steak, and I’d heard steak and kidney pie has been a hit in the UK for generations, I made a pan-seared steak, some cannellini beans mashed with truffled goat cheese, some kale for greenery, and a parsnip-potato pancake (improvised from a Union Square Cafe cookbook) for crunch.  As a home-coming meal, it was teetering on the edge between extravagant and overwhelming, but we all managed to enjoy it.  I’ll definitely try to learn more about kidneys and prepare them again.  If you can find them, give it a shot.  As a less-desirable organ meat, they are super-cheap and pack a lot of flavor.

If you want to learn more about offal, there are many great resources.  The local meat master, Larbo, of This Little Piggy, has explored everything but the oink.  Famous chefs are becoming more open about offal, as it becomes more available and trendy in times of economic hardship.  One notable chef is Chris Cosentino, who is known for his offal cooking skills.